Staying Motivated While You Search

Use social pressure#

Use social pressure to keep you motivated even when you lose motivation. Do a weekly standup with a small group of friends. Go around and say what you did that week, what results you’ve had, and what your plans are for the next week. Humans are social animals. Exploit your instinct to live up to what you said you would do by telling people you like what you will do. Bonus if they’re going through the same thing at the same time.

Listen to podcasts#

Listening to podcast interviews of how people broke into tech can be very motivational. It helps you realize there are thousands of people going through what you are going through right now. The backlogs of CodeNewbie, FreeCodeCamp, and Breaking into Startup’s podcasts were particularly helpful for me while going through this journey.

Time splits#

Time Splits are important. You don’t need to spend 100% of your job hunt literally hunting for jobs. Here’s a quick breakdown of what worked for me:

2-3 hours of algorithm practice#

I recommend two to three hours of algorithm practice. Arguably, algorithm questions are going away for job screens. However, at some companies, they are a rite of passage, and you don’t want to lose a great opportunity just because you didn’t cover your bases.

1-2 hours of job opp finding#

Dedicate one to two hours of job opportunity finding and emailing. There are two main sources of job opportunities for you:

• Finding something on a job board
• Hearing about an opportunity from your personal and social networks

From Hacker News to StackOverflow, many sites have job boards. If you belong to an underrepresented minority, don’t forget dedicated boards like POCIT Jobs, Include.io, Wallbreakers, Ada’s List, Hire Tech Ladies, Diversify Tech Co, YSYS, and Tech Talent Charter. Put everything into a tracker like Asana or Trello. Keep juggling those balls. Don’t rely on your own memory for deadlines. Track them and set alerts.

Two to Three hours of structured learning#

Dedicate two to three hours of structured learning through online courses or reading technical books from cover to cover, for example.

Rest of your time#

You can spend the rest of your time by:

• Building a side project
• Teaching your peers

Build a side project#

Set a reasonable deadline (one week or one month), and then just build your idea as best as you can by that deadline. Resist the urge to perfect it. Just get it to launch and get feedback. Build fun stuff, explorations, or clones.

📝 Note: See this chapter to learn how Cloning Open Source Apps can be a great way to learn. We also cover side projects in greater detail in this chapter.

Teach#

Optionally, teach. Livestream yourself on Twitch or do a meetup talk. In particular, try to get practice talking while you code. This is great practice for technical interviews.